Summary: Copyright Issues for MKM
A. A. Adams J. H. Davenport
The University of Reading The University of Bath
Abstract. We present an overview of the current situation and recent and ex-
pected future developments in areas of copyright law and economics relevant to
Mathematical Knowledge Management.
1 Introduction
The advent of digital information distribution has created both new opportunities and
new challenges in all information-rich fields. The new field of MKM is itself based
on this advent. As in all other fields some of the challenges for MKM are social and
legal as well as technical. As Lessig [1] put forward, social norms, law, economics
and technology are strongly interdependent spheres. Although the primary aims of the
MKM community are technical in nature the ramifications of technology for these other
areas, and the constraints of these other areas on what technology is useful, must be
addressed by this community. Here, based on the reports (Deliverables 1.1 and 1.2)
from Project MKMNet, we present some social and legal aspects of copyright which
are central to the way in which MKM technology may develop. There is an enormous
debate currently underway in society on how to move forward in a digital information
age with laws and social norms based upon analogue understandings of technological
possibilities. This debate is address below in section 1.1, although readers interested